Militant moderate, unwilling to concede any longer the terms of debate to the strident ideologues on the fringe. If you are a Democrat or a Republican, you're an ideologue. If you're a "moderate" who votes a nearly straight party-ticket, you're still an ideologue, but you at least have the decency to be ashamed of your ideology. ...and you're lying in the meantime.

Monday, August 08, 2011

Arya Deaf?

From the news you’d think aliens had landed and were busy frying the planet’s major cities with their death rays, but all that happened is what had been both predicted and threatened for months. One of the bond rating agencies had warned the United States that if they didn’t stop spending money like water in a flood that they’d find their bonds downgraded.

And of course the US government didn’t listen, and of course Standard & Poor’s followed through on their warning, and now the whole financial world is running around with their hair on fire at the shock and surprise of it all.

It’s pathetic, and we should be humiliated for it, that Russia – led by Vladimir Putin, an unreconstructed hard-core communist attempting to lead a new quasi-capitalist nation out of its prior socialist debt – has to scold the US about its fiscal lunacy, but that’s exactly what happened. Did any of our nation’s top-shelf socialist wanna-bes in the White House and Senate pay attention even to that? to one of their ideological own saying “STOP SPENDING MONEYyou don’t have and ruining it for the rest of the world”? No they did not.

Have they listened to China over the past several years – years – complaining about our spending habits? Have they even been observing China, the world’s largest socialist economy, as they expand and expand and expand by loosening government regulation and turning capitalist? Perish the thought.

Have they watched the social democracies of western Europe fall, one after another, into the dung pits of their own digging as they discover that, lo! and behold! what happens when you spend money that you don’t have and can’t earn because you give entitlements to people who often don’t even work for them is that you go into debt and at some point others will stop lending you money to give away “for free”? Have they ever contemplated that “free” when paid by the government isn’t free at all, and is actually more expensive since government is inherently inefficient? Have they even watched oil-rich Venezuela, being run [into the ground] by Hugo Chavez, folk hero for many of our nation’s brainless socialists, squandering their oil revenues on this very thing and running out of money in the process? Nope.

We didn’t listen to our own financial markets which have a thoroughly vested interest in the profitability of the US; we didn’t listen to those who’d just been down the Road to Socialist Profligacy only to find it a dead end. And we have the temerity to be offended that, first, S&P carried out their threat and that, second, it’ll cost us even more money that we don’t have as a result.

What part of STOP SPENDING MONEY is hard to understand?

The ballyhooed “debt deal” brokered by the National Savior and his ideological Senate merely made prior stupidity seem downright sage: it added 2.8 tr... tr... trillion dollars to the allowable funny-money the US is authorized to spend. The world’s financial markets, led by those in the US, indicated what they thought of it: they tanked. Wall Street responded with the worst week in their history since the 2008 chickens built by the Democrats’ laws demanding that mortgage lenders ignore the credit history of home buyers came back to roost.

The message was very clearly “STOP SPENDING MONEY” and all Congress and our big-eared President heard was “---- SPEND--- MONEY”. This was supposed to be good for the country because it signaled a bi-partisan solution to the debt issue: don’t worry about it, the bi-partisans assured us. If we are bi-partisanly foolish it’s good, but if we are in partisan deadlock because one partisan has a rational solution and the other partisan does not, that’s bad. And, yes it is bad … if we listen to the imbecile with the irrational solution.

When someone says 2+2=4 and someone else says 2+2=5, one person is correct and the other is not. When these two claim to represent the best interests of an entire nation, they are obliged to adopt the correct answer. Failure to adopt the correct answer, regardless of the politics, makes the nation wrong. And while most people interpret compromise as the best alternative in the face of intractable positions – which is to say 2+2=4.5 – it renders everyone wrong and signals that those who dropped the correct answer for the sake of meeting in the middle are whores.

The correct answer here is STOP SPENDING MONEY; this isn’t rationally debatable. It’s what Wall Street is telling us; it’s what the commodities market is telling us; it’s what our friends are telling us; it’s what we are busy telling Greece and Portugal [et al] to do in response to their own version of the same pickle. It’s even what we’re being scolded by foreign socialists to do. STOP SPENDING MONEY. Only one identifiable group of Americans arrived at this answer and hasn’t budged from it.

The Tea Party. Regardless of whatever else they may stand for or the political personalities insinuating themselves into the crowd, the Tea Party has the correct answer. STOP SPENDING MONEY.

The correct answer isn’t “Increase our credit limit because this type of problem is solved by spending even more than we have”. It’s STOP SPENDING MONEY.

What part of STOP SPENDING MONEY is unclear?

For its efforts, the Tea Party has been called terrorists – by their fellow Americans – and the S&P response of downgrading US debt has been termed “the Tea Party Downgrade” by world class mope and universal hypocrite John Kerry. He would seem to want to blame the whole world’s response to the US stupidity he was personally complicit in creating on the only American politicians who had the correct answer: STOP SPENDING MONEY.

It’s not that conspiracy theories are terribly unique in politics, but this one puts most of the typical conspiracy theories to shame. Whereas most require mere delusion, this requires a large dose of martyred megalomania on top of it. The Tea Party has been promoted from a Republican offshoot which doesn’t typically get respect even from mainstream Republicans [it’s not religiously zealous enough], to being the next contestant for Puppet Master following the tradition of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Masons, and the Knights Templar.

It’s not that S&P actually knows something about money and government debt; it’s not that the US markets and foreign markets do as well; nor is it that the socialists who tried [and failed] to prosper by spending every dime six times each know that government cannot spend itself to prosperity. It’s that the only group of politicians in the country to get the correct answer and stick to it are “terrorists” “wag[ing] jihad” on the US and have somehow gotten the entire world to go along with it.